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03 November 2010

Voices and Soul

22 October 2010

by Justice PutnamBlack Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

I was thinking about Kurt Vonnegut the other day. I was thinking about the firebombing of Dresden and the burning of Beatles albums in the South. I was thinking about the destruction of the Library in Alexandria and dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamyan. I was thinking of laws that prevented blacks from reading; and if there were no laws, the local Citizens Council made sure no reading occured.

Vonnegut was not the only one to call the bombing of Dresden an act of terror. Even British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson, a confidant of Churchill, admitted to AP war correspondent Howard Cowan, that the raid also helped destroy...

... what is left of German morale.

Cowan then filed a report that the allies had resorted to terror bombing.

The firebombing of Dresden, a center for Art and Literature, was a strategic act of terror. The burning of Beatles albums was a conscious act by white supremacists and one meant to intimidate. Laws to prevent the education of blacks and brown peoples are making a virulent resurgence. In fact, there are calls by the TeaBirchers to defund the Department of Education and to also limit funds for any education measure on the local level.

In the historic center of Baghdad, on a street named after the tenth century classical poet, Al-Mutannabi, a street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls, an area often referred to as the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community; a car bomb exploded and killed 26 people on 5 March 2007.

did you hear the euphony of the street as men wrangled and summoned swore and cajoled addressed if not solved defined if not created the problems and the promise of their country's tomorrow

did you even know of the dreams imploded inside the molten iron across the narrow book lined street as debate turned to barbed screeches philosophy into choked smoke and a thousand years of history was buried in the rubble